This invention relates to signal conditioning, more specifically to conditioning the signals between host computer and an associated terminal.
The interfacing of one piece of equipment with another has always presented problems, whether the equipment is analog or digital. In digital communication there are problems with assuring that the data transferred on an asynchronous communications line was correctly received, and that there have not been overruns in either direction. In addition, the ability to interface two pieces of equipment is often hampered by the line length or control character limitations of the equipment sought to be interfaced.
Several attempts have been made to standardize the interface between various items of digital equipment. These include the RS232 standard line, ASCII character codes, and the addition of checksums to asynchronous data transmissions.
These solve only a part of the problem. There is still the problem of dealing with the extraneous interline characters which some host computers transmit, the problems of transmitting large continuous blocks of data without regard to the limits of line length of some host computers, the communication of 8-bit binary information with a host computer without losing some information, the transparency of control characters, and the synchronization of the data transmissions between the host computer and the terminal to prevent communication line overruns. The present invention provides a means for overcoming these problems.